The Escape

Haffner Unbound

And so the century ended: with Haffner watching a man caress a woman's breasts.

It was an imbroglio. He would admit that much. But at least it was an imbroglio of Haffner's making.

He might have been seventy-eight, but in Haffner's opinion he counted as young. He counted, in the words of the young, as hip. Or as close to hip as anyone else. Only Haffner, after all, would have been found in this position.

What position?

Concealed in a wardrobe, the doors darkly ajar, watching a woman be nakedly playful to her boyfriend.

This was why I admired him. Haffner Unbound! But there were other Haffners too — Haffner Pensive, Haffner Abandoned. He tended to see himself like this; as in a dream, in poses. Like the panels of a classical frieze.

A tzigani pop album — disco drumbeats, accordions, sporadic trumpets — was being broadcast by a compact-disc player above the minibar. This weakened his squinting concentration. He disliked the modern zest for sex with music. It was better, thought Haffner, for bodies to undress themselves in the quiet of the everyday background hum. In Naples once, in what, he had to say, could only be described as a dive, in the liberated city, the lights went suddenly out, and so the piano stopped, and in the ensuing silent twilight Haffner watched a woman undress so slowly, so awkwardly, so peacefully — accompanied only by the accidental chime of wine glasses, the brief struck fizz of matches — that she had, until this moment, more than fifty years later, remained his ideal of beauty.

Now, however, Haffner was unsure of his ideals.

He continued looking at Zinka. It wasn't a difficult task. Her hair was dark; her nipples were long, and almost black, with stained pools of areolae; her stomach curved gently towards her hips, where the bone then steeply rose; her legs were slender. Her breasts and nose were cute. If Haffner had a type, then this was it: the feminine unfeminine. The word for her, in his heyday, would have been gamine. She was a garconne. If those words were, he mused, at the end of his century, still used for girls at all.

They were not.

A suckling noise emerged from Niko, who was now tugging at Zinka's nipples with the pursed O of his mouth.

Haffner was lustful, selfish, vain — an entirely commonplace man. It was the unavoidable conclusion. He had to admit it. In London and New York he had practised as a banker. His life had been unre-markable. It was the twentieth century's idea of the bourgeois: the grey Atlantic Ocean. The horizontal fretting waves of the grey Atlantic Ocean. With Liberty at one extreme, and the Bank of England at the other. But Haffner wasn't straddling the Atlantic any more. A hotel in a spa town was now Haffner's temporary home. He was landlocked — adrift in the centre of Europe, aloft in the Alps.

And now he was hidden in a wardrobe.

He was not, however, the usual voyeur. It was true that Niko was unaware of his presence. But Zinka — Zinka knew all about this spectral form in the wardrobe. Somehow, in a way which had seemed natural at the time, Zinka and Haffner had developed this idea of Haffner's unnatural pleasure. The causes were obscure, occasioned by some random confluence of Haffner's charm and the odd mixture Zinka felt of tenderness for Haffner and mischief towards her boyfriend. But however obscure its causes, the conclusion was obvious.

So, ladies and gentlemen, maybe Haffner was grand, in a way. Maybe Haffner was an epic hero. And if Haffner was a hero, then his wallet, with its creased photographs, was his mute mausoleum. Take a look! Haffner in Rome, wonkily crowned by the curve of the Colosseum, a medusan mess of spaghetti in front of him; Haffner and Livia at a garden party in Buckingham Palace, trying to smile while hoping that Livia's hat — a plate on which lay a pile of flowers — would not erupt and blow away; Haffner's grandson, Benjamin, aged four, in a Yankees baseball cap, pissing with cherubic abandon — a live Renaissance fountain — in the gardens of a country house.

All photo albums are unhappy, in the words of the old master, in their own particular way.

And me? I was born sixty years after Haffner. I was just a friend.

I went to see him, in a hospital on the outskirts of London. His finale in the centre of Europe had been a decade ago. Now, Haffner was dying. But then Haffner had been dying for so long.

— The thing is, he said, I just need to plan for the next forty-eight hours. We just need to organise the next few days of the new era.

And when I asked him what new era he meant, he replied that this was exactly what we had to find out.

Everything was ending. On the television, a panel was discussing the crisis. The money was disappearing. The banks were disappearing. The end, as usual, was continuing. I wasn't sorry for the money, however. I was sorry for Haffner. There was a miniature rose in bud on the table. Haffner was trying to explain. Something, he said, had gone very very wrong. Perhaps, he said, we just needed to get this closed — pointing to a bedside cabinet, whose lock was gone.

He was lower than the dust, he told me. Lower than the dust. After an hour, he wanted to go to the bathroom. He started trying to undress himself, there in his armchair. And so I called a nurse and then I left him, as he was ushered into the women's bathroom, because that bathroom was closer to the room in which Haffner was busily dying.

Standing in the hospital's elliptical concrete drive, as the electric doors opened and closed behind me, I waited for the taxi to take me to the trains — back to the city. Across the silver fields the mauve fir trees kept themselves to themselves. It was neither the country nor the city. It was nowhere.

And as I listened to the boring sirens, I rehearsed my memories of Haffner.

With my vision of Haffner — his trousers round his ankles, his hands nervous at his cream underwear — I began my project for his resurrection. Like that historian looking down at the ruins of Rome, in the twilight — with the tourists sketching their souvenirs, and the bells beginning, and the pestering guides, and the watersellers, and the sun above them shrinking: the endless and mortal sun.

His career had been the usual success story. After the war Haffner had joined Warburg's. He had distinguished himself with the money he made in the exchange crisis. But his true moment had arrived some years later, when it was Haffner who had realised, as the fifties wore on, the American crisis with dollars. Only Haffner had quite understood the obviousness of it all. The obtuseness of Regulation Q! Naturally, more and more dollars would leave, stranded as they were in the vaults of the United States, and come to Europe — to enrich themselves. This was what he had explained to an executive in Bankers Trust, who was over in London to encourage men like Haffner to move to New York. In 1963, therefore, Haffner left Warburg's for America, where he stayed as a general manager for eleven years. He was the expert in currency exchange: doyen of the international. Then, in 1974, he returned as Chief General Manager in the London office of Chase Manhattan. Just in time for the birth of his grandson — who had promised so much, thought Haffner, as another version of Haffner, and yet delivered so little. Then, finally, there came Haffner's final promotion to the board of directors. His banishment, joked Haffner.

Haffner, I have to admit, didn't practise the usual art of being a grandfather. Cowardice, obscenity, charm, moral turpitude: these were the qualities Haffner preferred. He had bravado. And so it was that, a decade ago, in the spa town, when everything seemed happier, he had avoided the letters from his daughter, the telephone calls from his grandson, the metaphysical lamentation from his exasperated family. Instead, he continued staring at Zinka's breasts, as Niko clumsily caressed them.

Since Zinka was the other hero of Haffner's finale, it may be useful to understand her history.

To some people, Zinka said she was from Bukovina. This was where she had been born, at the eastern edge of Europe — on a night, her mother said, when everything had frozen, even the sweat on her forehead. Her mother, as Zinka knew, was given to hyperbole. To other people, Zinka said she was from Bucharest; and this was true too. It was where she had grown up, in an apartment block out to the north of the city: near the park. But to Haffner, she had simply said she was from Zagreb. In Zagreb, she had trained in the corps de ballet. Until History, that arrogant personification, decided to interrupt. So now she worked here, in this hotel in a spa town, in the unfashionable unfrequented Alps, north of the Italian border — as a health assistant to the European rich.

This was where Haffner had discovered her — in the second week of his escape. Sipping a coffee, he had seen her — the cute yoga teacher — squatting and shimmying her shoulders behind her knees, while the hotel guests comically mimicked her. She was in a grey T-shirt and grey tracksuit trousers: a T-shirt and trousers which could not conceal the twin small swelling of her breasts, borrowed from an even younger girl, and their reflection, the twin swelling of her buttocks, borrowed from an even younger boy. Then she clasped her hands inside out above her back, in a pose which Haffner could only imagine implied such infinite dexterity that his body began to throb, and he felt the old illness return. The familiar, peristaltic illness of the women.

Concealed in a bedroom wardrobe, he looked up at what he could see of the ceiling: where the electric bulb's white light was converted by a dusty trapezoid lampshade into a peachy, emollient glow.

He really didn't want anything else. The women were the only means of Haffner's triumph — his ageing body still a pincushion for the multicoloured plastic arrows of the victorious kid-god: Cupid.

Reproductions of these arrows could now be found disporting on Niko's forearms, directing the observer's gaze up to his biceps, where two colourful dragons were eating their own tails — dragons which, if he could have seen them in detail, would have reminded Haffner of the lurid mythical beasts tattooed on the arms of his CO in the war. But Haffner could not see these dragons in detail. Gold bracelets tightly gilded Niko's wrist. Another more abstract tattoo spread over the indented muscles of his stomach — a background, now, to his erect penis, to which Zinka — dressed only in the smallest turquoise panties — was attending.

Situations like these were Haffner's habitat — he lived for the women, ever since he had taken out his first ever girl, to the Ionic Picture Theatre on the Finchley Road. Her name was Hazel. She let him touch her hand all through the feature. The erotic determined him. The film they had seen had been chosen by Hazel: a romance involving fairies, and the spirits of the wood. None of the effects — the billowing cloths, the wind machines, the fuzzy light at the edges of each frame, the doleful music — convinced sarcastic Haffner of their reality. Afterwards, he had bought her two slices of chocolate cake in a Lyons Tea House, and they looked at each other, tenderly — while, in a pattern which would menace Haffner all his life, he began to wonder when he might acceptably, politely, try to kiss her.

He was mediocre; he was unoriginal. He admitted this freely. With only one thing had Haffner been blessed — with the looks. There was no denying, Haffner used to say, mock-ruefully, that Haffner was old — especially if you took a look at him. In the words of his favourite comedian. But Haffner knew this wasn't true. He was unoriginal — but the looks were something else. It was not just his friends who said this; his colleagues acknowledged it too. Now, at seventy-eight, Haffner possessed more hair than was his natural right. This hair was blond. His eyes were blue; his cheeks were sculpted. Beneath the silk weave of his polo necks, his stomach described the gentlest of inclinations.

Now, however, Haffner's colleagues would have been surprised. Haffner was dressed in waterproof sky-blue tracksuit trousers, a sky-blue T-shirt, and a pistachio sweatshirt. These clothes did not express his inner man. This much, he hoped, was obvious. His inner man was soigne, elegant. His mother had praised him for this. In the time when his mother praised him at all.

— Darling, she used to say to him, you are your mother's man. You make her proud. Let nobody forget this.

She dressed him in white sailor suits, with navy stripes curtailing each cuff. At the children's parties, Haffner acted unconcerned. As soon as he could, however, he preferred the look of the gangster: the Bowery cool, the Whitechapel raciness. Elegance gone to seed. His first trilby was bought at James Lock, off Pall Mall; his umbrellas came from James Smith & Sons, at the edge of Covent Garden. The royal patent could seduce him. He had a thing for glamour, for the mysteries of lineage. He could talk to you for a long time about his lineage.

The problem was that now, at the end of the twentieth century, his suitcase had gone missing. It had vanished, two weeks ago, on his arrival at the airport in Trieste. It had still not been returned. It was imminent, the airline promised him. Absolutely. His eyesight, therefore, had been forced to rely on itself — without his spectacles. And he had been corralled into odd collages of clothes, bought from the outdoor-clothes shops in this town. He walked round the square, around the lake, up small lanes, and wondered where anyone bought their indoor clothes. Was the indoors so beyond them? Was everyone always outdoors?

He was a long way from the bright lights of the West End.

Zinka leaned back, grinned up at Niko, who pushed strands of her hair away from her forehead: an idyll. He began to kiss her, softly. He talked to her in a language which Haffner did not know. But Haffner knew what they were saying. They were saying they loved each other.

It was midsummer. He was in the centre of Europe, as high as Haffner could go. As far away as Haffner could get. Through the slats on the window he could see the blurred and Alpine mountains, the vague sky and its clouds, backlit by the setting sun. The view was pricked by conifers.

And Haffner, as he watched, was sad.

He lived for the women. He would learn nothing. He would learn nothing and leave everyone. That was what his daughter had said of him, when she patiently shouted at him and explained his lack of moral courage, his pitiful inadequacy as a husband, as a father, as a man. He would remain inexperienced. It seemed an accurate description.

But as Zinka performed for her invisible audience, Haffner still felt sad. He thought he would feel exultant, but he did not. And the only explanation he could think of was that, once again, Haffner was in love. But this time there was a difference. This, thought Haffner, was the real thing. As he had always thought before, and then had always convinced himself that he was wrong.

The pain of it perturbed him. To this pain, he had to acknowledge, there was added the more obvious pain in his legs. He had now been standing for nearly an hour. The difficulty of this had been increased by the tension of avoiding the stray coat hangers Haffner had not removed. It was ridiculous, he thought. He was starting to panic. So calm yourself, thought Haffner. He tried to concentrate on the naked facts — like the smallness of Zinka's breasts, but their smallness simply increased his panic, since they only added to the erotic charge with which Haffner was now pulsing. They were so little to do with function, so much to do with form — as they hung there, unsupported. The nipple completed them; the nipple exhausted them. They were dark with areolae. Their proportions all tended to the sexual, away from the neatly maternal.

Haffner wasn't into sex, after all, for the family. The children were the mistake. He was in it for all the exorbitant extras.

No, not for Haffner — the normal curves, the pedestrian features. His desire was seduced by an imperfectly shaved armpit, or a tanning forearm with its swatch of sweat. That was the principle of Haffner's mythology. Haffner, an admirer of the classics. So what if this now made him laughable, or ridiculous, or — in the newly moralistic vocabulary of Benji, his Orthodox and religious grandson — sleazy? As if there should be closure on dirtiness. As if there should ever be, thought Haffner, any shame in one's lust. Or any more shame than anyone else's. If he could have extended the epic of Haffner's lust for another lifetime, then he would have done it.

In this, he would confess, he differed from Goldfaden. Goldfaden would have preferred a happy ending. He was into the One, not the Many. In New York once, in a place below Houston, Goldfaden had told him that some woman — Haffner couldn't remember her name, some secretary he'd been dealing with in Princeton, or Cambridge — was the kind of woman you'd take by force when the world fell apart. Not like his wife, said Goldfaden: nothing like Cynthia. Then he had downed his single malt and ordered another. At the time, helpful Haffner's contribution to the list of such ultimate women was Evelyn Laye, the star of stage and screen. The most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, when she accompanied her husband to his training camp in Hampshire, in 1939. They arrived in a silver Wolseley 14/16. Goldfaden, however, had contradicted Haffner's choice of Evelyn Laye. As he contradicted so many of Haffner's opinions. She was passable, Goldfaden argued, but it wasn't what he had in mind. And Haffner wondered — as now, so many years later, he watched while Niko stretched Zinka's slim legs apart, displaying the indented hollows inside her thighs, the tatooed mermaid's head protruding from her panties — whether Goldfaden would have agreed that in Zinka he had finally found this kind of woman: the unattainable, the one who would be worth any kind of immorality. If Goldfaden was still alive. He didn't know. He didn't, to be honest, really care. Why, after all, would you want anyone when the world fell apart? It was typical of Goldfaden: this macho exaggeration.

But Haffner no longer had Goldfaden. Which was a story in itself. He no longer had anyone to use as his silent audience.

This solitude made Haffner melancholy.

The ethos of Raphael Haffner — as businessman, raconteur, wit, jazzman, reader — was simple: no experience could be more pleasurable than its telling. The description was always to be preferred to the reality. Yet here it was: his finale — and there was no one there to listen. In the absence of this audience, in Haffner's history, anything had been known to take its place; anything could be spoken to in Haffner's intimate yell: himself, his ghosts, his absent mentors, even — why not? — the more neutral and natural spectators, like the roses in his garden, or the bright impassive sun.

He looked at Zinka, who suddenly crouched in front of Niko, with her back to Haffner, and allowed her hand to be elaborate on Niko's penis.

As defeats went, thought Haffner, it was pretty comprehensive. Even Papa never got himself as messed up as this.

Was it too late for him to change? To undergo one final metamorphosis? I am not what I am! That was Haffner's constant wish, his mantra. He was a man replete with mantras. He would not act his age, or his Age. He would not be what others made of him.

And yet; and yet.

The thing was, said a friend of Livia's once, thirty years ago, in the green room of a theatre on St Martin's Lane, making smoke rings dissolve in the smoky air — a habit which always reminded Livia of her father. The thing was, he was always saying that he wanted to disappear.

She was an actress. He wanted this actress, very much. Once, in their bedroom with Livia before a party, he had seen her undress; and although asked to turn away had still fleetingly seen the lavish shapeless bush between her legs. With such memories was Haffner continually oppressed. It wasn't new. With such memories did Haffner distress himself. But he couldn't prevent the thought that if she'd undressed in front of him like that, then it was unlikely that she looked on him with any erotic interest — only a calm and uninterested friendliness.

Yes, she continued, he was always saying how he'd prefer to live his life unnoticed, free from the demands of other people.

— But let me tell you something, Raphael, said Livia's friend. You don't need to disappear.

Then she paused; blew out a final smoke ring; scribbled her cigarette out in an ashtray celebrating the natural beauty of Normandy; looked at Livia.

— Because no one, she said, is ever looking for you.

How Haffner had tried to smile, as if he didn't care about her jibe! How Haffner continued to try to smile, whenever this conversation returned to him.

Maybe, he thought, she was right: maybe that was the story of his life, of his century.

And now it was ending — Haffner's twentieth century. What had Haffner done with the twentieth century? He enjoyed measuring himself like this, against the grand categories. But that depended, perhaps, on another question. What had the twentieth century done with him?

The era in which Haffner's last story took place was an interregnum: a pause. The British empire was over. The Hapsburg empire was over. Over, too, was the Communist empire. All the ideologies were over. But it was not yet the time of full aromatherapy, the era of celebrity: of chakras, and pressure points. It was after the era of the spa as a path to health, and before the era of the spa as a path to beauty. It was not an era at all.

Everything was almost over. And maybe that was how it should be. The more over things were, the better. You no longer needed to be troubled by the constant conjuring with tenses.

In this hiatus, in the final year of the twentieth century, entered Raphael Haffner.

The hotel where Haffner was staying defined itself as a mountain escape. It had the normal look. It was all white — with a roof that rose in waves of red tile and green louvred shutters on all three floors, each storey narrower than the one below. The top storey resembled a little summerhouse with a tiny structure made of iron shutters on the roof, like an observation post or a weather station with instruments inside and barometers outside. On top of it all, at the very peak, a red weathercock turned in the wind. Every window on every floor had a balcony entered through a set of French doors. Behind the hotel rose the traces of conifered paths, ascending to a distant summit; in front of it, pooled the lake, with its reflections. Beside this lake, on the edge of the town, there was a park, with gravel diagonals, and a view of a distant factory.

Once, the town had been the main location for the holidays of the Central European rich. This was where Livia's family had spent their summers, out of Trieste. They had gone so far, in 1936, as to purchase a villa, with hot and cold water, on the outskirts of the town. In this town, said Livia's father, he felt happy. It had style. The restaurants were replete with waiters — replete, in their turn, with eyebrow. Then, in the summer of 1939, when she was seventeen, Livia and her younger brother, Cesare, had not come to the mountains, but instead had made their way to London. And they had never come back. Seven years later, in a hotel dining room in Honfleur, where Haffner had taken her for the honeymoon which the war had prevented, she described to Haffner, entranced by the glamour, the dining rooms of her past. Crisp mitres of napkins sat in state on the tables. The guests were served not spa food but the classics of their heritage: schnitzel Holstein, and minestrone. The Bearnaise sauce was served in a silver boat, its lip warped into a moue. There was the clearest chicken soup with the lightest dumplings.

And now, when this place belonged to another country, here was Haffner, her husband: alone — to claim the villa, to claim an inheritance which was not his.

The hotel still served the food of Livia's memory. This place was timeless: it was the end of history. The customer could still order steak Diane, beef Wellington — arranged on vast circles of china, with a thin gold ring inscribing its circumference. Even Haffner knew this wasn't chic, but he wasn't after the chic. He just wanted an escape. An escape from what, however, Haffner could not say.

No, Haffner could never disappear.

In 1974, in the last year of his New York life, when Barbra — who was twenty-nine, worked in the Wall Street office as his secretary and smoked Dunhills which she kept in a cigarette holder, triple facts which made her desirable to Haffner as he passed middle age — asked him why it was he still went faithfully back every night to his wife, he could not answer. It didn't have to be like that, she said. With irritation, as he looked at Barbra, the steep curve between her breasts, he remembered his snooker table in the annexe at home, its blue baize built over by Livia's castles of unread books. He knew that the next morning he would be there, at home: with his breakfast of Corn Chex, morosely reading the Peanuts cartoons. He knew this, and did not want to know it. So often, he wanted to give up, and elope from his history. The problem was in finding the right elopee. He only had Haffner. And Haffner wasn't enough.

Zinka turned in the direction of the wardrobe. Usually, she wore her hair sternly in a pony tail. But now she let it drift out, on to her shoulders. And Haffner looked away. Because, he thought, he loved her. He looked back again. Because, he thought, he loved her.

No, there was no escape. And because this is true, then maybe in my turn I should not always allow Haffner the luxury of language.

He was burdened by what he thought was love. But therefore he did not express it in this way. No, trapped by his temptations, Haffner simply sighed.

— Ouf, he exhaled, in his wardrobe. Ouf: ouf.

In this vacant hotel room to which Zinka had lured Niko, Zinka had arranged things so that she was facing the mirror which hung above the bed. Behind her, stood Haffner — in the wardrobe. Before her, sat Niko, his legs and his testicles dangling over the edge of the bed. His foot protruded close to Haffner's lair. One of his toenails, Haffner noted, was blackened — the badge of Niko's fitness, of the dogged distances he jogged every day.

But Haffner felt no grievance at the disparity between their bodies. He had perspective. This was one reason to love him. He had the sense of humour I admired. It wasn't just that it was possible to imagine that what was higher could derive always and only from what was lower — in the words of another old master. No, one could go further. And so it was also possible to imagine that — given the polarity and, more importantly, the ludicrousness of the world — everything derived from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory was made up exclusively of beatings.

This defeat, therefore, could be a victory too. It seemed unlikely, perhaps, but Haffner rarely wanted to be burdened with the problems of probability. Haffner found perks everywhere.

Niko's face was now smothered by the dark nipples of his girlfriend. He was blinded by her body. He therefore couldn't see that, in the mirror, she was looking at the wardrobe, where Haffner was looking at her. Her lips were parted. She was smiling at him: at the invisible Haffner she knew was lurking there, having first splashed a tangle of coat hangers hurriedly into a drawer. Haffner happily smiled back. Then he stopped himself. It felt obscurely comical for a man to be smiling when concealed in a wardrobe. So, shyly, Haffner looked away. He gazed at her thin back instead, gently imprinted with vertebrae.

A thought arrived to Haffner. Was this it? he considered. Was this love?

When he was seventeen — so Haffner once told me, when we were both drunk on vodka cokes, at a golden-wedding party themed for no obvious reason to gangster films of the American 1970s — Haffner had gone to sleep each night imagining the girl he would meet, who would be his perfect girl. This was very important, he said. She would be a woman of the world, attractive, with a hint of something more, if I knew what he meant. I knew what he meant: he wanted the urban, he wanted a vision of cool. And, he told me, he continued to do this — even after the advent of his wife (and his girlfriends, his collection of lovers). Even there, in this spa town, at seventy-eight, he still calmed himself to sleep imagining this girl who would be so infinitely charmed by him. But now, something had changed.

As of now, this girl was simply Zinka.

This was not, of course, what Haffner was meant to be thinking. But then Haffner had a talent for not thinking the orthodox thoughts.

It wasn't enough that Haffner was failing to accomplish the bureaucratic task, which was why he was here, in this spa town: to oversee the legal restoration to his family of the villa — appropriated first by the Nazis, then by the Communists, and finally by nationalist capitalists — which now, in the absence of any other surviving relative, belonged theoretically to Haffner and his descendants. No, even here, in the centre of Europe, he had managed to complicate matters even more mythologically. In addition he had already managed to concoct this unusual story with Zinka. Not content with this, he had also managed to concoct another more ordinary story: an affair with a married woman, staying at the hotel. Her name was Frau Tummel. She said that she adored him; and one aspect of Frau Tummel's soul was its sincerity.

Haffner, however, at this moment, didn't care about Frau Tummel's soul. He knew that he was meant to have been with her — regarding a sad sunset. But Zinka's sudden plan had possessed an overwhelming power of persuasion.

He was not a good man. He didn't need to be told. The jury wasn't out on Haffner's ethics. The case was closed. As a businessman, he had tended to the risky; as a husband, to the unfaithful. He hadn't really cared about his duties as a father or a grandfather. He cared about himself.

How fluently Haffner could self-lacerate! Then again: how easily Haffner could be distracted from his tribunal.

Niko began to whimper, gently. Why, thought Haffner, in his cupboard, did Haffner have to be old? It was devastating; it was Sophoclean. How could this love for Zinka have arrived so late in his life? Yes, Haffner was lyrical. He understood the language of inspiration. Here it was. Yes, here it was. He was inflated: a Silenus raised from his stupor, made buoyant by a force which was beyond him, as he stood there, neatly framed by a hotel wardrobe.

I should pause on that adjective Sophoclean, that noun Silenus.

Haffner was an admirer of the classics.

He had always watched the television dons; he had listened to the radio intellectuals. And now, at this late stage, in his retirement, Haffner had embarked on a programme of enlightenment — a succession of evening classes. Even if he would learn nothing about himself, he still wanted to know everything about anything else. So there they were: the old and unemployed, the desperate to learn. Into this group came Haffner. In these classes, Haffner read history. That was his idea of the classic. Occasionally, after he had returned to London, until Haffner's dying took over, I came with him. We grappled, in the introductions to the classics, with the concept of philosophic history. History which was ironic, clever, unimpressed.

The course on the Lives of the Caesars was Haffner's late education. He listened to a man berate the Caesars for their immorality. What a lesson it was, said Errol — sitting behind a desk which was too small for him, being made for a lissom teenager, not a distended middle-aged man — what a lesson in vanity, in the way power corrupted. To which the group, all seated at miniature desks, solemnly assented. A poster on the wall displayed a range of fluorescent vegetables and their appropriate names in German. Then Haffner asked if he could say something. He understood that they had all been very moved by the book which was the subject of this course. And he would like to say that he had been the most moved of them all. He had been converted, he said: and now he fully understood the grandeur of the Romans. He hadn't cared for them before, but now, said Haffner, reading about the glorious crimes of the emperors, he saw how truly great they really were.

At this point, Haffner paused for the expected laugh. It did not come.

Blissfully, Haffner had roamed along the shelves of the hotel library, parsing its eccentric selection of the classics. Beside his bed, there was now an abridged edition of Edward Gibbon, underneath his copy of the Lives of the Caesars. By his lounger at the side of the pool, with its view of the snow-shrouded mountains, was a novel by Thomas Mann. He liked to stretch himself. Only after a week here had Haffner realised he was the only one who read. Everyone else favoured sleep; they favoured chatter. But Haffner respected those things over which he had no authority. Those things made him want to accrue their authority too. His will was all vicarious.

Haffner hadn't been to university. His daughter had been, and his grandson, but not Haffner. He had been to war instead. But Haffner felt no insecurity. He had his own triumphs. It was Haffner, for instance, who had persuaded the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Emeritus Professor of Economic Theory at the LSE — Goldfaden, hero of the Brains Trust, doyen of the radio lecture — to be gathered in one unheard-of trio at the annual dinner of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers, in 1982. He wasn't nobody.

And now he was a student of philosophic history. With this knowledge, he weighed up his biography: he studied the story of Livia, his wife; and Goldfaden, Haffner's friend and counsellor. Goldfaden: the celebrity economist, famed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Goldfaden was a capitalist; but a capitalist who liked to tease. Where, Goldfaden would ask his baffled listeners, was the greatest monument to international esprit? Who had inherited the mantle of Isaac Leib Peretz, the Jewish cosmopolitan? The man who had once argued, at the beginning of the century, that it was a unique culture rather than its patrolled borders that guaranteed a nation its independent existence. True, maybe. But you couldn't beat patrolled borders to help you sleep at night, thought Haffner. Couldn't beat them. While Goldfaden carried on his party trick. They couldn't guess? They couldn't say which was the most cosmopolitan country on earth? The Soviet Union, of course! The greatest federation of nations this world had seen since the Roman empire. Communism! The highest stage of imperialism. What Jew wouldn't love an empire? An empire, continued Goldfaden, was the greatest political system on earth — a confederation of states, blithe to the problems of ethnicity. The zenith of liberalism. But its era was now over; and Goldfaden mourned it. Or so he said, thought Haffner.

But Haffner was still not ready to consider the problem of Goldfaden.

One time, having finished the classic novel I had told him to read, Haffner told me that it had prompted certain thoughts. Think about it: the novel of education was lost on the young. It was the old who were the true protagonists. It was the old, thought Haffner, who deserved the love stories. Return, Monsieur Stendhal! Let yourself go, Mr Dickens! Feast on Haffner! Write a sentimental education for the very old, the absolute advanced.

But no one would.

It was a pity, because Haffner was a folk hero. These were the stories I grew up with — about Haffner. He was a man of legend: his anecdotes were endless. Like this, his final story.

Because there it was, once more, the lust — extravagant: like a sprinkler in the rose garden of Haffner's suburban home, automatically turning itself on to soak the lawn already soaked with rain.

Niko was now spread on the bed, his legs twitching. His eyes were shut. Zinka was poised, leaning over his face. His mouth was blindly searching — a kitten — for her breasts.

Then Haffner swayed and chimed against the hangers.

Niko was stilled. Haffner was stilled, his heart an amplification. Only Zinka continued as if nothing had happened. She tended to Niko; she asked him to carry on. And Haffner stood and listened to his heart as if he were only an outsider — as if he were the minicab driver waiting outside a nightclub, in the dawn, in the East End of London, or the Meatpacking District of New York, listening to the deep bass rhythm through the guarded doors while swapping two Marlboros for two much stronger and harsher cigarettes illegally imported from Iran.

To Haffner's slow relief, he noticed that slowly Niko was slowly distracted, slowly.

He really should have been somewhere else, thought Haffner. He should have been with Frau Tummel. Or, even more morally, he should have been in his own room, in his own bed, asleep, with his head slipping off the bolster's irritating cylinder — before returning once again, the next morning, to the Town Hall and its endless offices, where the subcommittees sat, the subcommittees which included the Committee on Spatial Planning. The Committee over which Haffner was here to exercise his charm. Yes, he should have been performing his role as a family man. But Haffner, somehow, still preferred this wardrobe with a view.

Livia's own erotic style, he remembered, watching Zinka, had been subtler. She would meet him in the foyer of the municipal pool in Golders Green, having just performed a synchronised swimming routine, and Haffner would say to her, laughing, that she was his emissary in the world of women. He would beg her to tell him what she saw, in the changing rooms. Livia sat him down. She touched him with the tips of her fingers absently resting on his penis through the button fly of his trousers, for this was how gentlemen dressed, and she told him about the girls in their changing room, the ones who shaved the hair between their legs into neater triangles, the ones who stood there, naked, pretending nobody could see, a festival of women. And Haffner would ask her not to stop, not to stop, and Livia would say that she wasn't stopping, dear heart: she wasn't stopping.

Then Zinka and Niko came to their own conclusion.

Haffner relaxed, relieved. He was beginning, he realised, to be too preoccupied by the practical difficulties of this display. Now that it was over, he began to long for his own bed. But Niko, to Haffner's irritation, seemed to be in a languid state of abandon. He wanted to lie there; he wanted Zinka to rest in his arms.

This was not, thought Haffner, at all what he had been led to expect.

And Haffner waited, in a wardrobe, while a couple held each other: amorous.

Oh Haffner had stamina! So often, in the bedroom, Haffner surpassed everyone's expectation. So many people thought they knew him! As if anyone could really know him. But Haffner would often argue that in this matter of Haffner's monstrosity one could draw some distinctions. He wasn't, for example, a monster like Caligula. The incest didn't move Haffner. Whereas Caligula used to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn. And very possibly his mother. And his brothers. His mother and his brothers and his aunts.

Haffner was the generalissimo of hyperbole. Unlike a real generalissimo, however, he had to perform the hyperbole himself.

My poor Haffner: his own shill.

No one else, for instance, was so sure that the obvious comparison to Haffner was Caligula. It wasn't so much Haffner's monstrosity which troubled his family, but his absolute mundanity. Whenever his daughter, Esther, brought up the issue of his adultery, his bed tricks, she said he was banal. She would stand there, in her business suits, with their badly cut trousers; her silk blouse; the sleek blonde bob which Haffner regretted, taming as it did the cuteness of her curls. This belittling idea of hers had always unnerved Haffner. He felt a distant sense of pique. Surely, he would reason, unconvincingly, afterwards — to an unconvinced Haffner, or an unconvinced anonymous drinker, or the indignant husband of his daughter — the infidelity had contained infinite riches, if only you knew how to look? From one perspective, pure vanity: yes maybe. But from another — what gorgeous vistas! What passes, what valleys, what pastoral hillocks!

Was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, in a crescendo of impatience, as he waited for Niko and Zinka to leave, as Zinka paused in the doorway, looking back to the innocent wardrobe — was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, as he finally emerged, with being a man of feeling?

The classics were full of it. The loves of the gods were various. The loves of Jupiter, for instance, were a festival of costume change, of metamorphosis. He mated with Aegina as a flame, Asteria as an eagle, Persephone as a snake; with Leda he took the form of a swan, with Olympias a snake. To Semele he appeared as a blazing fire, to Io as a fog, to Danae as a shower of gold. When he first slept with Juno, his wife, he became a cuckoo. Alcmena and Callisto were won by his impersonations of humans. Yes, the loves of Jupiter were famous. They had heft.

With these stories Haffner sought consolation.

But, I have to add, in the many stories of Haffner, he was always only himself.

Haffner Amorous

Returning to his room, Haffner rounded a corner and passed a coiled roulade of fire hose pinned to the wall, as he happily imagined his bed and its crisp sheets, a single circle of chocolate laid out on one diagonal fold. And then he discovered the weeping monumental form of Frau Tummel.

For what was up was also down, and what seemed a victory, after all, was really a defeat: so Haffner's happiness must always be subject to swift reversals.

Frau Tummel was in a cotton nightgown, with ruched lace at the breasts, and a cotton bathrobe stitched with pink tight roses. There, in front of his door, Haffner confronted her — outlandish in his sky-blue and pistachio ensemble. He looked around, to see if anyone else might be there. He felt burdened with concern: for Frau Tummel, and for himself. He didn't want to explain why it was that he had returned to his room this late, in such exhaustion.

Frau Tummel raised her face, displaying the ravages of her mascara: a harlequin.

— What are you doing here? said Haffner, brightly.

— We had a rendezvous, she said.

— Come now, said Haffner, less brightly.

Maybe it was over, she said, sadly.

— Over? said a Haffner transformed into the sign for a smile: a single reclining parenthesis.

Yes, continued Frau Tummel. It would end with him leaving her. She knew this. And it was right. For sure. It was understandable.

He tried to reassure her. Of course he wasn't going to leave! The idea of it! And Frau Tummel said that yes, she knew this. She knew he thought this was true. But how could he know this? There were so many complications. She really thought they needed to discuss this.

The sign for Haffner was no longer a supine parenthesis.

He knew what he was meant to say. He didn't want to say it. He wanted to be alone; to go to sleep. But Haffner had his code of honour. This was one aspect of his undoing. He was an admirer of the classics, and no man with a classical education could deny the wills of women. The classics taught one, he had decided, to trust in the pagan gods. Trust Cupid. Trust him in all his other guises, as cherubs, or as Eros. The men must always allow themselves to be led by the women. So he said what he was meant to say. He wondered if she would like to come into his room.

Frau Tummel raised her ravaged face: a joyful harlequin.

So ended, in one swift exchange, the swift moment of Haffner's happiness.

The imbroglios seemed so fluently to come to Haffner.

He was here to claim his wife's inheritance — therefore, naturally, he became involved with other women. This seemed to be the logic of his life.

They had met two weeks ago, on the second day of his stay, at the swimming-pool complex in the hotel's basement. There were three pools — three adjacent water lilies, each attached to the other by a miniature set of steps. The smallest was a Jacuzzi — for the indolent, or the fat. In it could therefore be found Haffner, who was indolent, and Frau Tummel, who was fat.

The voice of Frau Tummel, he soon discovered, was husky, it was rasping. She had class. She wrapped herself in a towel to go and lie on a lounger outside, to smoke three rapid cigarettes, pinched in the contraption of her extravagant cigarette holder — which unfolded and then unfolded one more time, just when you thought it could not be extended further. Then she relapsed into the boiling Jacuzzi, to Haffner's charmed curiosity.

He wasn't normally so devoted to swimming pools. He preferred the gyms — the exercise machines which prolonged to such a surprisingly toned extent the overlong life of Haffner. The gym was another place where we had fleetingly made conversation. Occasionally, I would happen on Haffner in the changing room: and, delighted, he maintained a naked conversation — our penises dolefully looking away — while I stood there on the bobbled tiles wishing I were not faced by the superior nature of Haffner's so much older muscles. Although the gym was really a place of yearning for Haffner. It was, quite frankly, most often a place of rest. In the gym, a slothful primate, he could let his arms droop over the bars on the chest press. Below the slope of his T-shirt, his arms were white and darkly speckled, like a photocopy. From here, he could observe the varieties of breast movement — some solid in sports bras, others fragile, unsupported, tenderly visible. He developed a stare for this purpose, an alibi — heavy-lidded with exhaustion, hypnotically unfocused, unable to look away.

Frau Tummel worked in the perfume industry. She was here in this spa hotel with her husband — whose nerves, she told Haffner, were gone, whose blood pressure was abnormal. He spent his days on the veranda, looking at the silent mountains: sipping peppermint tea. It was, thought Haffner, the old old story: the loyal wife who was bored of her loyalty — the century's normal story of a spa.

When Frau Tummel had gone, Haffner leaned back in the Jacuzzi, letting the movement of the bubbles absorb his concentration with their frantic foam — and then he padded off, leaving dark echoes of his feet on the floor's lukewarm tiling. In one room, he discovered a table with flowers: gentian, violets. In another room there was a sauna, where a woman was lying, motionless, on the pine slats of the highest step. Haffner paused, considered not. And then he pushed open another door, and discovered Frau Tummel again, in the process of being massaged. She was lying on her front, on a towel monogrammed in stitched gold thread with the hotel's invented crest. And in her shock she leaned up, so exposing to Haffner's gaze the moles on her breasts, the beginnings of her pink areolae, cobbled with cold.

He apologised, and went outside. Twenty minutes later he apologised to her again, in the rest room, illuminated by low lighting, and inventively perfumed candles — tuberose, lily, pomegranate. They decided to go for a walk. They made for the peak of the mountain. Light shimmered on her hair. She was uninterested in Haffner's ability to name the varieties of Alpine star, the daisies and the grasses — names he had culled from a colour-coded children's botany book, the white flowers in one section, the pink in another, bought in a fit of nostalgia for Haffner's earnest youth when buying chocolate in a tabac. She wanted to talk about love. She wanted to talk about her marriage, which entailed discussion of Haffner's marriage. It involved so many sacrifices, did he not think? The conversation so absorbed them that soon she was back in the hotel with Haffner, sitting on his bed. This did not surprise Haffner. Nor was it surprising that, as she lit a final cigarette, then stubbed it out, Haffner discovered that, without realising, as he kissed her, he had gone too far. He had overstepped, or overreached.

Yes, because nothing in this world occurs without a backstory: and what is higher always derives from what is lower and every victory contains its own defeat.

That day, Frau Tummel's feelings had been a little depleted. She had been demoralised by a fractious meeting with her husband's doctor in the morning; and then by an unhappy phone call from her mother at lunchtime. The massage had been suggested by her husband — it would, he said, cheer her up. The casual flirting with Haffner was an improvised addition of her own. But nothing, thought Frau Tummel now, as she stubbed out her final cigarette, was improvised. Nothing was casual. Everything was fate.

Like Haffner, she saw signs everywhere.

She turned round, and Haffner kissed her. And Frau Tummel kissed him back — for he was the magical combination of clever and kind. He understood her. But at this point, her body overtook her.

Frau Tummel was fifty-five. Her periods, as she used to tell her girlfriends, in a spirit of European openness, were becoming more and more erratic. Her cycle was unpredictable. The night before, after an absence of three months, a period had begun. And so she did not want to have sex with Haffner. She did not even want to undress. He must not touch her. Gently, Frau Tummel tried to explain her feelings to Haffner.

She didn't want to say, she said. He should not make her say.

And Haffner did not mind, he told her, gently. For he knew why — the constant coyness of unfaithful wives. So Haffner continued to kiss her. Through his trousers, hesitantly she touched the nub of his penis, blunted by his briefs.

Born with a different kind of soul to Haffner, Frau Tummel's husband was repelled by her periods. Quickly they had developed an unspoken rule that they would never have sex at these times; nor would he even touch her. Frau Tummel was therefore amazed when Haffner was so undisgusted. Such elegance! Such delicacy! It even tempted her, for a moment, to relinquish her scruples. But no, she thought, gathering herself, she really shouldn't.

Perhaps if she had slept with Haffner, she might not have been so moved. But she did not. So Frau Tummel could nurture her feelings, invulnerable to complication. On returning to her husband, she could wonder why it was she was so impatient with desire.

Haffner didn't know how seriously Frau Tummel took her moment with Haffner. He thought this was what she did. He thought she had done this before. She would go so far, and then back off.

Frau Tummel, however, had never been unfaithful. She was not trained at it. The guilt of it confused and overtook her, the next morning, as she woke up beside her husband, cutely rumpled in a mess of pillow and pyjama.

The guilt of it confused and overtook her — Frau Tummel! who was fifty-five! but at fifty-five you can still, after all, be inexperienced — that this feeling she felt for Haffner must be love.

She didn't know that love was always the beginning of Haffner's downfall. She didn't know that this was what Haffner was gloomily concluding, as he observed Frau Tummel's weeping form, sipping a gin and tonic he had invented from the minibar.

Mainly, the love belonged to other people. Once, it had been Haffner's.

When he was courting her, in the summer of 1939, Haffner used to take Livia dancing in metroland, the green and pleasant suburbs of north London. Since Haffner was a little perturbed by this girl who had the glamour of a foreign accent, Italianate, a flutter, he tried to impress her with the gorgeousness of his dancing, for at that time Haffner — so Haffner said — had the finest pair of feet in north London. And in Highgate once they sat down after a dance, and looked at each other, while Haffner worried about the visibility of his erection, mummified in his underwear. They had been dancing a foxtrot. He crossed his legs, making sure that Livia could not see or know about it. But she knew. And it intrigued her. She sat there, and she wondered if Haffner would do anything so bold as try to kiss her. They had been courting for some time now. She had just turned eighteen. And she wondered if she would be interested if Haffner did indeed do something. Yes, she thought, she would. But it needed Haffner first. While Haffner, who was shy despite his fleet feet, his slick blond hair, decided that he could do nothing without her visible approval. And so Haffner and Livia sat together and neither touched nor talked.

Two weeks later, at a dance hall in Hendon, they argued about this.

She was sorry, concluded Livia, but it didn't happen and if it didn't happen then it couldn't happen. Haffner asked if this had to be true. Yes, said Livia, it did. And she left Haffner outside, and went back in on the arm of another man. There was a small wart on the right-hand side of his neck, like a piece of gravel. So Haffner had nowhere to go. He walked away from home, towards the river, for an hour, into the dismal city. He reached the Gray's Inn Road, then High Holborn, where the family law firm was, the family law firm which he was destined never to enter, and then wandered back, finding himself in Clerkenwell. This, he discovered, was a mistake. All the Italian shops made him even more nostalgic for his Livia. He passed Chiappa & Sons, the organ makers on Eyre Street Hill; the working men's club — the Mazzini Garibaldi — where her brother, Cesare, would later sit and play morra: teased for his elegant accent, his neat small hands. In the cab shelter opposite Hatton Garden, by the Italian church, Haffner sat at a table beside an initial pool of gravy which he mopped up with the folded triangle of a napkin. He looked out the window. Up on Leather Lane, a jumper was caught in a tree. It settled, sodden, between a collection of branches. And as he gazed at this wrecked jumper, improbably in the branches of this silver birch, Haffner realised that it wasn't a kiss he wanted: it wasn't even the body of Livia. He wanted her for ever. He wanted to marry her. And so he concocted an imaginary conversation between an imaginary Haffner and an imaginary Livia, as he looked at the way the foggy rain made the occasional lamp outside a sieved and shimmering haze, a delicate gold.

These thoughts returned to Haffner, sentimental, in the Alpine rain, observing the different gold of a Central European desk light.

He knew this was all very wrong, said Frau Tummel.

— Oh I don't know, said Haffner, airily.

She had decided that she really must cheer up. She must not be so down. She must not show him this face of hers.

What he did to her, what he made her feel: was wrong, said Frau Tummel. He was a bad man, she said — tapping him on the nose: a disgruntled, startled puppy. He was a bad man.

She may have been delicious, thought Haffner, sadly — with her joyful breasts, her trembling thighs — but her concerns were not his concerns. It was undeniable. The flirting surely could have possessed slightly more elan. But Frau Tummel didn't want sophistication. Frau Tummel's thing was love. She went for the serious. And Haffner was not in the mood for love; or the serious. Or maybe I should say: he didn't go for love now, with her. With Frau Tummel he would have liked, instead, to be delirious with appetite.

The love was all for Zinka.

— Yes, yes, said Haffner. You told me that.

And maybe this was not fair. Maybe this wasn't accurate to the difficulty Frau Tummel was feeling.

Did he know, she asked him, how lucky they were?

— How lucky? queried Haffner.

Yes, how lucky they were, repeated Frau Tummel.

He looked at her. She stepped forward, let the belt of her bathrobe undo itself, pushed it off her shoulders, on to the floor. Then she unbuttoned her nightgown to her breasts, and pulled it down over her shoulders. Now, therefore, she was naked — except, to Haffner's surprise, for her bra. The bra saddened him; it added to her pathos. Like the bathrobe, it was dotted with stitched pink roses.

In this bra, Haffner confronted the problem of love.

Haffner was not all barbarian, not all the time. He was helpful. He tried to please. Weakly, not wanting to sadden her, he wondered if they should order some champagne.

Stricken, he watched Frau Tummel smile.

— Oh, said Frau Tummel, it is a good life, is it not?

Haffner's deepest wish was to possess the total independence of a mad imperator; a classical god. But the stern line of Haffner's cruelty was always complicated by the kink of his kindness.

Frau Tummel leaned across the bed, on to her stomach, and picked up the phone. She talked to reception as she lay there, her legs kicking in the air. It was such a girlish gesture, this kicking in the air.

While somewhere else — but where? Dubrovnik? La Rochelle? — a younger Livia opened the wardrobe in their hotel room so that the mirror reflected the bed on which she flung herself, face down, thus able to be ravaged from behind by her marauder, the angel Raphael, while simultaneously watching her angel rear devastatingly above her.

But where? Dover, in 1949!

Haffner leaned forward, and spread Frau Tummel's legs apart: revealing their symmetrical Rorschach stain — like a picture of a butterfly once solemnly presented to him by his grandson, Benjamin, constructed by pressing one half of the paper over the other — already stained with Benji's idea of a butterfly's smudged if multicoloured pattern. Haffner began to lick her, gently, as she tried to finish the call. And as he licked her, as he parted her, she started to invent more and more food. They would have champagne, she said, yes — and also caviar. And blini. And a Russian salad. And pickled cucumbers. And oh, she said. No, oh, she said. She was fine. She was very well. If they could bring everything in, if they could just come up and put everything in her room. If they could bring it up. If they could bring it up. And put it in. Then she put the phone down, and revelled in the pleasure of Haffner's flesh.

If he was touching her like this, then of course it was love. No one except her husband had ever touched her in this way. Not even her husband had touched her in this way.

Too soon, the room service arrived. She gathered herself back into the bathrobe. Haffner, in his dishevelled tracksuit, tipped the waiter, wondering if he could induce him to stay, deciding that he couldn't.

— You aren't angry with me? she asked.

But why, asked Haffner, would he be angry?

But it was so complicated. She was sorry. She was sorry for being so complicated. But he had to understand. She had a husband.

Haffner understood.

He must think it was like Romeo and Juliet, she said.

Haffner did not reply: he had no idea how he could reply.

— You know, she said, I am not. This is not me. But it is difficult to hide the secrets of the heart.

— Hide what? said Haffner, appalled.

— Raphael! said Frau Tummel. You are too much.

And Haffner considered the extraordinary way in which a life repeated itself. For Livia had used this phrase for him. Just once. Or a phrase resembling this phrase. Maybe he was too much for her, she said. Maybe in the end he was too much even for her. And when he had tried to tell Livia, this was in 1982, the night of his triumphant dinner for the Institute of Bankers, that all he wanted was her, she turned away. They were sitting in the kitchen. She was in a nightgown which Haffner had never liked — being made of a blue towelling, which tended to make her look, he argued, unattractive: he never wanted the cosy, the comfortable, only the erotic. That was one form, he now considered, of his immaturity. So maybe everyone had him right. He could understand it. He was too much for himself.

He put his fingers to Frau Tummel's lips. She began to kiss them. Each finger she curled into her mouth.

What could really go wrong, thought Haffner, in a hotel, in a spa town? It seemed safe enough.

But then he had to correct himself. He allowed his will to follow the wills of women. That was his classical principle. But he knew that this had its problems too. He freely admitted this. When the women were in love with him, then Haffner was no longer safe. This was one aspect of his education. It had happened with Barbra. It had happened before Barbra. And now, he worried, it was happening again.

This was one aspect of his education. But Haffner would never learn.

Haffner acceptingly approached the women who approached him as if they were portents. They were Haffner's irresistible fate.

He didn't, he once said — in a conversation which was now legendary in Haffner's family, when confronted by Esther after Livia's death with accusations of his truly infantile excesses — he didn't want to regret anything. No, he didn't see why he should be left with any regret. He said this without really thinking, as he said so many things. Or so argued Haffner afterwards — after it had become his definition. As if a man's marriage, said Esther, triumphantly, with the absolute agreement of her family, should ever make him regret anything. Esther's husband, Esmond, did not continue the conversation. And although it had passed into the annals of his family as the epitome of Haffner's selfishness, as recounted to me once by Benjamin, I was not so convinced. Awkward he may have been, but Haffner was not malicious. And Benjamin, with his new-found devotion to his religion, his new-found devotion to the family, was not, I thought, a reliable moral guide: he had lost his imagination.

Nor, I tried to say to Benjamin, had Livia ever been public with her disapproval. If she really disapproved. So maybe this should make us pause as well.

One can be so rarely sure, Haffner once said to me, that what one has done is right. So maybe it was possible that in his self-defence Haffner was being truthful, rather than self-deceiving. He was simply being faithful to his refusal of self-denial; his absolute distrust of the philosophy on which it was based, the puritanical certainty.

Which was one reason, surely, why Livia might love him. For Haffner's absolute sense of humour.

Oh the comic pathos of dictators! Haffner's sense of humour!

Maybe they were never really given their moral due. More and more, as Haffner lay beside the swimming pool, or sat on a bench in front of an Alpine view, he approved of the scandalous emperors. He couldn't understand the world's astonishment.

Like Augustus, who had absolute faith, so wrote his historian, in certain premonitory signs. Once, when a palm tree pushed its way between the paving stones in front of his home he had it transplanted to the inner court beside his household gods, and lavished care on it. Just as Haffner found it difficult to reject the women who entered his sphere of orbit. Who could have the hubris to reject the artistry of chance? If Augustus didn't, then why should Haffner? Even if it was unclear how much his meetings with women were to do with chance, rather than the machinations of Haffner's will. But then again, Augustus could be a mentor here as well, since it was Augustus who justified his adulterous affairs as the necessary burden of an emperor — charged with knowing the secrets of his subjects, his closest advisers. Of course an emperor had to sleep with his counsellors' wives! How else would he know what they were thinking? There was nothing in it for Augustus: his sexual life was all in service to the state.

And in fact this was not a new discovery of Haffner's. Perhaps he had forgotten, but the emperors had entered his moral universe before. Years ago, Livia had been reading about these Roman dictators. They were all in Dubrovnik, in the wilds of Europe, during one of Esther's summer holidays. They lay underneath a parasol, moving their position in relation to it as the day wore on, a live performance of a sundial — and, to the shuffle of the sea, Livia read aloud to Haffner from the book which her brother had given her. A new translation. Haffner was slowly sunburning. And she had mischievously read out to Haffner the story of Tiberius — the man who had built a private sporting-house, where sexual extravagances were performed for his secret pleasure. Hundreds of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae — but what did spintriae mean? wondered Haffner: it must have been dirty; it must have been good, or the man would have translated it: no, said Livia, there was no footnote, nothing — would perform before Tiberius in groups of three, to excite his waning passion. Some aspects of his criminal obscenity were almost too vile to discuss, much less believe, read Livia. Imagine training little boys, whom he called his minnows, to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him! Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother's breast suck at him — such a filthy old man he had become! So wrote his historian. But neither Livia nor Haffner was so prone to judgement.

Filthy old man or not, they seemed to get Tiberius. The experimenter with pleasure: a pioneer of power — always minuscule before the infinite.

A few years later, at the time of the Brazilian coup, they had been in Sao Paulo — some deal with a bank which didn't work out. The deal, and the bank. With their host, who impressed Haffner with the beauty of his wife, and the cultural beauty of his life, they were sitting in a theatre, watching a classic of contemporary theatre. And even Haffner was amused when the police burst in, and called up everyone involved on stage. They took a programme and began to intone the names: the actors, the stage manager, the lighting designer. Dutifully, the arrested provocateurs lined up on stage. And finally, stated the policemen, confident in their authority, they demanded that the arch instigator, the impresario of this whole production should present himself to the police as well: a man with the unlikely Brazilian name of Bertolt Brecht. Everyone looked concernedly around. Mr Brecht appeared, they thought, to have disappeared.

And what Haffner now remembered was how that night, in their hotel room, Livia had confessed that however much she found it funny, however much she had laughed with their hosts, with the audience, with the entire tropical night — deep in her worried thoughts was a regret. She still felt sorry for the deluded dictatorial policemen.

The poor dictators! Even the dictators, after all, were the dupes of accident and defeat.

At this moment, for instance, Frau Tummel was trying, in the words of the comics, to offer Haffner pleasure. Perhaps this might not obviously seem like a defeat. But look closer, dear reader — look closer. Enter Haffner's soul. Haffner was beginning to feel melancholy. Soft in Frau Tummel's mouth, his penis had no point to it.

If the ghost of Livia were looking down, at this moment, perhaps she would have found this funny, thought Haffner. And so could he. It was just another instance of the accidental.

He touched Frau Tummel, gently, on her grey and golden hair — on the combed grey roots. Could he ask her, politely, he said, to stop doing what she was doing?

Frau Tummel looked up, the head of his slumped penis slumped on the slump of her lower lip. A thin trail of saliva, unnoticed, connected the two. Haffner tried to be romantic: he tried to maintain the tone. She still loved her husband, he told her. She was being silly. But no, said Frau Tummel. It was over a long time ago. And she bent down, continuing to show her affection to Haffner. While Haffner despaired. His soft penis was not moving. It hung there: obeisant to the law of gravity.

It wasn't, obviously, the first time this kind of event had occurred. The despair was local. It had placed Haffner in a difficult social situation. On the one hand, it meant that he could not experience the pleasures he had previously experienced with Frau Tummel. But, on the other hand, he could not ask her to leave. His pride would not allow it. So he was trapped into a conversation — where Frau Tummel had the power. She pitied him; she pored over him; she looked after him. She stated the permanence of their love.

His impotence had trapped Haffner in a conversation he wanted to be over. This sadness was creating so much more intimacy than he ever wanted. He tried to concentrate on images of the erotic: he tried to think about Zinka's breasts. But Zinka eluded him. He remembered the way Livia had touched him, the first time, at the ponds on Hampstead Heath — her hand dipping under his briefs, under the curve of his tense strained penis, a hand which he delightedly and immediately made wet with his semen. Neither of them had spoken. She simply withdrew her hand, took out a handkerchief, wiped it gently — a gesture which for Haffner still seemed fraught with tenderness.

And maybe that had been the moment when he decided to marry Livia: when he knew that he was in love. Just because it had happened so fast. All his triumphs, he began to think now, were just defeats reconfigured. Like the time he batted for five hours in Jerusalem, in 1946, thus securing an improbable draw on a pitch destroyed by three days of tropical rain.

He looked at Frau Tummel. Frau Tummel was looking with tenderness at him: an absolute maternal tenderness. A tenderness which made Haffner afraid with its intimacy. And she bent down, kissed his penis, at its tip.

— Whatever you want, she said. Whatever you want, I will do.

He looked down at his drooping penis — once faithful in all his infidelities. Its defeat now should not, he reflected, have surprised him.

— You can have me, said Frau Tummel, anywhere. If that will help. You can have me where my husband has not had me.

Frau Tummel believed in the reality of their love. She believed that this love was truth. Frau Tummel was not a libertine: for her, the erotic was an aspect of love. She was a Christian woman. She had been brought up to trust and worship the instincts of her soul.

Or was now not the right time for her little lamb? she wondered. Perhaps not, replied her little lamb. Perhaps not.

— We must, said Frau Tummel, talk to my husband. It is the only right thing.

She said this with no enjoyment, no glory. She had come here with her ill husband. She was a model wife. And she would leave with her life destroyed, she thought. She could not live without her husband, and now she could not leave without Haffner. To Haffner, however, it seemed so unnecessary. He talked about the need to take their time. He talked about the need not to injure the blossom of their love.

The dawn was just beginning, in the window. There was a light sparse rain.

But maybe it was possible, she added, for Haffner to forget. If he would only let another woman into his life — to care for him, to be his companion.

Frau Tummel's will was just another way in which the twentieth century was conspiring to entrap Haffner. Once more, he had entered Mitteleuropa. It was a place which had always amazed him. Its endless capacity for seriousness! The intellectual fervour! Whenever he thought about the Europeans, he became hysterical with exclamations. Ever since he discovered, through Cesare, that the Russians wrote to each other with exclamation marks, Haffner had liked this theatrical way of talking. The European vocative — addressing absent abstractions. Love! Death! Fame! Bohemia! Wherever Bohemia was. It was how he always thought about Cesare. Whom Haffner had loved. Of whom Haffner despaired.

Cesare used to come up with Livia from Charlton, in south London, where they were boarding, at the home of a paint salesman from Trieste. Haffner used to sit with him on Wimbledon Common.

He was about twenty; Cesare was about eighteen. Cesare delighted in deckchairs. And patiently Haffner explained the rules of cricket. Cesare was slightly deaf in one ear — after an accident when he was a child. He didn't mind, however, because in Cesare's opinion it added lustre to him. His deafness was distinguished. He listened to Haffner with one hand cocked, like the flower of an ear trumpet. A hollyhock, thought Haffner. Patiently, he convinced Cesare that just because the two batsmen were at opposite ends of the wicket, this didn't mean that they were on different sides. Cesare could not understand this. He tried, but he could not.

Haffner loved him, but had never quite got him. Never, in his entire life, did Cesare lose his comical Italian accent. His hair was white by the time he was twenty; but his eyebrows for ever were black. And Haffner never asked him if this was due to nature or nurture. Yes, Cesare would sit there, reading War and Peace, while Haffner watched the cricket. This must have been 1940, thought Haffner. When the BBC was supporting the Russian cause with its radio version of Tolstoy's novel. Haffner must have been on leave, or about to ship out. He would test Cesare on the characters' names from the bookmark — on which was printed each family, and a guide to pronunciation.

And then, as always, they discussed the politics of Europe. To Cesare, this was natural. So natural that from that point on it had marked his life, thought Haffner, these discussions of European politics: the endless problems Cesare found with any kind of state. Problems to which Haffner was oblivious. He had the arguments with anarchists, with Socialists, with social democrats and liberal democrats. He had talked them through with Fascists and with Communists. Cesare himself had preferred a modified form of Communism. Haffner, the Englishman, had demurred. He wouldn't be swayed by Cesare's assertion that Haffner, like Cesare, was a Jew, not an Englishman; that as a Jew he really should be more mindful of the rights of minority peoples.

Cesare was European; and Haffner was not.

Haffner did care about the rights of minorities. His way of displaying this was simply less exhibitionist than others — or so Haffner told himself. In 1938, for instance, at the Scarborough Cricket Festival, a week or so before Chamberlain set off for Munich, he had remonstrated with his father, who had offered the opinion that a Nazi Britain might have its advantages — less obsessed with money, less nouveau riche — unconvinced as he was that Hitler really meant to do away with every Jew. First, Raphael had reminded him, Hitler really did want to do away with every Jew; and secondly — he continued — what was so wrong with the plutocrats? Who had a problem with the City of London? He wasn't bothered by the vulgar, Haffner. He didn't see why Papa should so look down on people.

But then, sanity had never been Papa's hallmark. In the Great War, he had joined up in the Rangers. He served in the Dorsetshire Regiment, a machine-gunner. He served throughout the battle of Passchendaele, until he was wounded.

— Anything is better than war, said Papa. Anything.

And although Haffner thought he was the opposite of Papa, I am not so sure. No, like Papa, Haffner never took the Europeans seriously. Like Papa, he never quite understood their rages.

— My theory of course is that Cohen is not a real Jew, Haffner once said to me, talking about Goldfaden's friend, a Canadian Marxist Jewish academic: the son of immigrant pioneers. He's too Jewish to be true. My theory is, continued Haffner, that at a certain point in, say, the 1950s, he realised that his career could flourish if he were Jewish — not true now, of course, not true now — and that he therefore took on the persona of a Marxist Jewish intellectual.

— In reality, he concluded, his ancestry is Polish. Working-class anti-Semitic Polish. He denies this, of course. But then, finished Haffner, pouring himself another drink, smiling at me, ignoring my empty proffered glass, he would.

Haffner was silent. He kissed Frau Tummel, gently, on the cheek.

— I have an idea, said Frau Tummel. We will swim. Yes? We will have eine kleine dip. You have a wife. I have a husband. We must forget them both. For an hour.

But Haffner, he was realising, could forget nothing. Haffner was still ancient. He was wondering if Trajan had come here. Was this the land of Dacia, or Dalmatia? Pannonia? The Romans had conquered everywhere; their triumph was total. So presumably the legionaries had ended up in these mountains too — blistered, their groins chafed, their cracked nipples greased with duck fat to protect them against the coarse fabric of their shirts — and then afterwards, on their return to Rome, they had set up that column with its curving wrap-around frieze, like a stick of candy — or like the lighthouse on Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks, where Haffner had spent a weekend with Livia, where they had seen the dolphins shimmying after each other, their sheen dappled and mottled in the water. Yes, that column which Haffner had seen when he was twenty-four and remembered nothing about the Romans except the fact that an orator called Cicero made many speeches — speeches, Livia told him, which had been delivered in that sad and empty brick building on the edge of the Forum. It hadn't moved Haffner then. It seemed to move Haffner now.

He had understood Livia, and Livia had understood him. She had borne with fractious grace the obvious signs of infidelity; the crazy signs of infidelity — like the moment when she saw a woman driving down the high street in Hendon, in Haffner's car. A car, he told her that evening, he had donated to the garage because it was out of order. How could he control what the garage had done with it next (folding his napkin, finding his pipe, leaving the room, aggrieved)? Yes, she understood the dictators. Livia — the most naturally elegant woman he ever knew: who once played tennis naked, he suddenly remembered, in the rain, after two gimlets and three martinis, at some friend's house in the Cotswolds. Oh he was stricken!

— Raphael! said Frau Tummel. Are you listening?

And yes yes, said Haffner, in another world entirely — where a rejuvenated version of Haffner issued giggling directions from the passenger seat, as Livia drove them back to London, tipsy and still naked except for a towel across her waist, the seat belt tight between her freezing breasts.

Haffner Amphibious

The lake in this town was not the kind which Haffner admired: it had no follies — no ruined grottos, no temples to Venus. Its spirit was civic, not aristocratic. Politics possessed it, not pleasure. It lay in front of the hotel; on the edge of the park. In the distance, made fuzzy to Haffner — bereft, as ever, of his glasses — were the twin peaks of the mountains, and their thinner silhouettes, the twin peaks of the factory chimneys. And all the cement apartment blocks: the random codes of their illuminated windows like the punched cardboard sheets for street organs.

Beside this lake, as the dawn freshened, Frau Tummel began to undress. Haffner looked around, nervously. They were sheltered, here, by two clustering beech trees. They did not reassure him very much. He looked at Frau Tummel, who was bending over, folding her nightgown. The tuft of hair between her legs was visible then invisible as she leaned further forward, arranging her bathrobe on top of the nightgown: a neat arrangement of squares.

An echo in Haffner's mind, Zinka bent over to extract her stocking from the bed's scalloped valance.

Reluctantly, Haffner undressed. He displayed his slighter breasts to the gathered winds: the voyeuristic zephyrs. They made for his pink nipples, the droop of his ghostly pectorals. He let his shirt drop where it wanted: it tumbled to the ground, a dying swan.

Just as after yet another late night of working he would undress in his dressing room, or on the landing, leaving puddles of clothes behind his tiptoeing footsteps — and then enter the bedroom, feeling the carpet on his bare feet, the densely corrugated metal strip at the door where the carpet ended, and then be suddenly surprised by Livia turning on an enquiring lamp, so that he paused there, a satyr, stalled in the pursuit of an invisible prey.

At the jetty, Haffner paused. The wood was greasy. Frau Tummel was already in — treading water, only her head visible. Her face had transformed itself into a smile.

— It is delicious, she said. You must come in.

Haffner was not amphibious, not normally. But nothing, at the moment, seemed normal. Their affair had been marked by water. Water was its motif. First the swimming pool, the Jacuzzi: and now this. It was unusual in the life of Haffner. In general, he avoided water. Although it was true that there had been that night in the baths at Rome — the day after they had liberated the city. The opened city.

Silk reflections from the water had unfolded on the ceiling. The building was Haffner's most exalted idea of the grand. It was monumental. It was imperial. The largest bronze eagle he had ever seen was spread, like a mounted butterfly, against a wall.

There had been other moments in Jacuzzis, whirlpool baths. There had been, also, Livia's love of swimming competitions, with her hair invisible in its sleek white cap. But, in these scenes, the water was an accessory. It was almost furniture.

He put a foot in, holding on to the jetty's post: paused. He retracted his foot.

— It is very cold, he said, gravely.

He looked around. The wind was breathing through the trees. But Haffner didn't want the nymphs, the naiads and dryads: the sylvan pastoral.

It wasn't that Haffner was immune to nature. Haffner was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society. Its journal would arrive, a precise oblong, in its plastic wrapper. It was the only society to which he felt allegiance: a community which shared his love of the cultivated, the meekly tended — the romance of the rose.

Haffner was an expert in breeding roses. He loved the extraordinary lottery of each new specimen. All the textbooks talked of the evolution of a species in temporal terms; for them, everything proceeded in a logical order. The first was always the most important. But breeding, Haffner decided, proved this could not be true. It was a pure fluke, if a new variety of rose was formed, and therefore propagated, before another one. Its place in the species had nothing to do with time. It was much more like a jigsaw puzzle. In nature, Haffner found the self-sufficiency of art. But he didn't describe it like this; which is how I might have described it. For Haffner, this insight had other vocabulary. That things could happen according to a logic which one could not understand was no argument against that logic's existence. But perhaps this was not right, either; perhaps Haffner didn't use words to describe the pain it caused him, the lush pain as he looked at the photographs of gardens in exotic places, full of grace, these places in another hemisphere — Persia, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

You have no idea how therapeutic it can be — he would tell bored Benji, bovine — to take the secateurs and go out into the garden, after a hard day's work. Everyone, he would add, must have a hobby; and Benjamin, who at this point, when he was fifteen, wanted no hobbies, no bourgeois attributes, absently nodded.

Now, however, Haffner was oblivious to the pastoral: he wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted sirens, emergencies, the asphalt and the smoke. The asphalt jungle and the big smoke. He wanted the transparent lethal purity of carbon monoxide.

So Haffner looked away, into the landscape, and there discovered to his dismay a shape which was walking with a staccato lilt, and which therefore would soon resolve itself into the more solid flesh of Zinka. Presumably, thought hampered Haffner, she was on her way back to work at the hotel. He looked down: at his slight breasts, his bright nipples, the hair around his belly button: his penis dwindling in the cold. An acorn, it blended in with the arboreal theme. There seemed no obvious hiding place, thought Haffner, rapidly assessing the bleak and empty parkland — and in any case it was too late. Zinka had seen him. Shame possessed Haffner — a shame that she was seeing him like this, so unclothed; and a greater shame of seeing her so soon after the escapade of the night before. He was not quite sure how one was to behave, when one has just concealed oneself inside a wardrobe in a vacated hotel room, to watch a woman nakedly converse with her boyfriend. But most of all, he felt embarrassed of her seeing him with Frau Tummel: in this illusion of intimacy. Because love was his downfall. And with Zinka, he was concerned that the love this time belonged to Haffner.

If only he could have explained how little Frau Tummel meant to him! Then, perhaps, he would have been glad to see Zinka. But he could not. So, in an ecstasy of embarrassment and shame — the only forms of ecstasy which seemed still available to Haffner — he jumped in.

As he sank, the everlasting problems of Haffner's life concentrated themselves into more particular problems of the body. He felt sheathed in cold; enveloped. It seemed unlikely that he would ever feel warm again. The water was dark, slubbed with weeds.

At first, Haffner thought that he was only sinking. But this was premature. Gradually, he felt his body ascend: gifted with buoyancy.

Finally, he reached the surface, where Frau Tummel joyfully greeted him. He tried to tread water. It seemed harder than he remembered. His heart was gripped by cold. He felt it slow, then slow some more. This scared him. His breathing became more difficult. He looked around for safety. No safety seemed visible.

— It is wonderful, no? said Frau Tummel.

Carefully, trying to swim suavely, Haffner made as if to disport himself, a porpoise, in the water. He tried to move towards the jetty, where he could cling to a step, or a pole.

— And how are you? asked Zinka: above him.

— Oh we are very well! said Frau Tummel. Is it not wonderful? Zinka smiled at Haffner: a bubble of intimacy. Haffner, his hair slick over his forehead, a bedraggled pony, tried to smile winningly back.

Then he felt the weather begin. It started to rain on Haffner, and his mistress, gently, in the lake.

He clung to the jetty, and found no solace. He was out of his depth, thought Haffner. In all the possible senses.

They seemed to be having fun together, said Zinka. They weren't together, said Haffner. They thought it would be charming, said Frau Tummel. That wasn't right, Haffner tried to say.

The rain became stronger. In response, Haffner maintained a casual grin. Glancing with mock-helplessness at the heavens, Zinka said that she really had to be getting to work. Was it really necessary? asked Haffner. Frau Tummel glared at him. Yes, said Zinka, she felt so — after all, they didn't want her there, did they, interrupting them? Oh, said Haffner. He was sure that wasn't true. Was it? he asked Frau Tummel.

She didn't want to make Zinka late, said Frau Tummel.

It wasn't special to Haffner, the desperation he felt as reality crowded in. Haffner was special only in his hyperbole: his unusually stubborn refusal to accept the order of the facts. And because he was determined in his refusal of reality, hyperbolic with effort, Haffner said to Frau Tummel that of course Zinka wouldn't be late. It really wouldn't happen. In any case, if there were any trouble, he would take care of the matter. Indignantly Frau Tummel splashed away. Haffner looked at her. Zinka looked at her. Then, before Haffner could turn back to Zinka, Zinka had looked away.

— I should be going, said Zinka.

Surely, thought Haffner, he could think of something to say? Surely at this point he could come up with the sentence which would charm Zinka, and make her stay?

No, said Zinka. She really had to go. Frau Tummel splashed noisily in the calm water. Momentarily, Zinka was distracted. But she would see them later, no — perhaps for the aerobics? She smiled at Frau Tummel; then at Haffner. It would be at twelve. And she turned around, while Haffner gazed after her: her retreat in the grey towelling of her tracksuit.

Well, that went well, he thought, brightly. One should build on that. They weren't far off, he decided, mordantly, from reaching an understanding.

And this was how I could have depicted Haffner as an allegory, if I had wanted to make Haffner an allegory — with a woman walking away from him and a woman swimming away from him, while he clung to a jetty, frantically thinking, failing, possibly dying.

Now, announced Frau Tummel, they must swim. She offered Haffner the prospect of catching her, and then set off, with swift strong choppy strokes — the fat shaking beneath the curves of her biceps — towards what might, to Haffner's straining eyes, have been an island: or might have been just debris, floating in the lake.

Around him, the horizons gathered, and their attendant mountains.

He set off. Mistakenly, he swallowed some cold and soiled water. Very soon he wallowed back. If he could only move his arms, thought Haffner, then he might survive. The prospect seemed unlikely. It seemed improbable that Haffner's body would ever work again.

He was not, it was true, famous for the accuracy of his self-diagnosis. The day he thought he had cancer, he asked Livia if he could show her his testicles. She had just come out of the shower — in a perfume of synthetic citrus fruits. Her hair was flattened against her face, which emphasised the way her face with its perfect cheekbones looked old, looked mournfully mature. He proffered her a testicle, asked her to feel it. She declined. Over breakfast, he pointed out that he should probably go to see Ordynski. Livia tightened the lid on the marmalade and agreed that he probably should. If it was absolutely necessary, then of course he should. And so it was that Haffner went to his doctor, who told him that no, there was nothing to worry about: there was no evidence of any tumour.

Haffner corrected Ordynski.

— Not yet, he sadly said.

He was the recorder on the grandest scale of all the ways in which life was unjust to him. These ways were mainly physical. And maybe Haffner was right: maybe this was one way of living healthily — minutely to record a list of all the unfair weaknesses he endured: a heart murmur, an attack of asthma, exploratory tests on his kidneys and aorta in an effort to discover the causes of Haffner's exorbitant blood pressure. Then the possible cancers, the lingering viruses. If this made him a hypochondriac, so be it. So what if he was still alive? It didn't prove the irrelevance of his symptoms. It didn't prove that one day they wouldn't unfurl themselves into truths.

What no one seemed to understand, he used to tell his daughter, as they watched Benjamin play cricket, on some sports ground in the bucolic environs of London — before Benjamin developed his intellectual difficulties with the idea of sport — was how the imagination of disaster was such a burden. He wouldn't wish it on anyone. It was no joke, living with illness in the way that Haffner lived with it. It was debilitating. Churchill, in Marrakech, got through his pneumonia on pills. He knew that. But that was Churchill. And Esther had simply got up, silently, straightened the creases in her slacks, and gone to buy herself a tea.

And as he mournfully watched the distant image of his grandson perform the neat parallelogram of a forward defensive stroke, Haffner considered the sad truth that his fears were never believed. Haffner was always alert to the way a life became a system of signs. It didn't seem unreasonable to Haffner. Greater men than Haffner, he reminded the now imaginary Esther, had been caught in the trap of a justified paranoia. Wasn't it well known, thought Haffner, that an emperor, of all people, was the most miserable of men — since only his actual assassination could convince the people that the manifold conspiracies against his life were real? This was one resemblance of Haffner to the emperors. Only Haffner's death would convince his family that he had been right all along.

In the mercurial water, this death seemed finally imminent. Frau Tummel had swum back. Such a kitten he was, to dislike the joys of water! And angrily Haffner had gestured at Frau Tummel — a gesture which was meant to signify absolute irritation, but because this gesture meant that he let go of the jetty, he suddenly found himself underwater, then hoisted by Frau Tummel in an ungainly manner back towards a pole which he grabbed at, gratefully, spouting water like a respiring whale.

Frau Tummel asked after him, but Haffner could not speak. Breathing heavily, he looked across the lawns. On the edge of the park, there was what to Haffner seemed another park. This one was an area of tarmac, for children's games. Yearningly — because Haffner adored all games — he imagined the roundabout, the swings, the rocking horses with their bellies pierced by springs. The springs beneath one swaying horse were creaking in the wind: as if, thought Haffner, the horse were neighing.

This playground seemed a refuge to Haffner.

Frau Tummel had plunged underwater, to tug at his legs, pulling him away from the safety of the jetty, into the abysmal open water. There was sun as well, true, but the sun was no help to him now. The rain was coming down, thought Haffner, really quite hard.

Behind the hills arc'd a fuzzy rainbow.

— You are so Englishman! said Frau Tummel. Enjoy yourself, my love. Express your feelings!

He couldn't help thinking that Frau Tummel was angry with him. No other explanation seemed plausible for her oppressive joyfulness. Swimming wasn't how Haffner expressed himself. When he wanted to express himself, he turned to his clarinet.

He wouldn't do it, he told Frau Tummel. He wouldn't swim. He was finished. And he raised himself gradually out of the water, the sheen streaming off him in the pale beginning sunlight.

And as he stands there, rubbing at his body with a towel which seemed of an unnaturally limited size, gathering his clothes about him, I feel a little sad that Haffner's moments of self-expression should be so absolutely historical. Let Haffner be allowed his chapter of jazz!

For he played his clarinet with abandon, in the suburbs of north London. Dutifully, he studied Benny Goodman's exercises for the modern player: the complex intervals of his jazz arpeggios. The greatest melody of all time, thought Haffner, was 'Begin the Beguine', as rendered by the genius Artie Shaw. For its outlandish, unhummable length. Its reckless shape which defied all normal ideas of the proper lifespan of a melody. That was self-expression. But self-expression, so often, was banned for Haffner. Gently, Livia would beg him to think of the neighbours. And Haffner would reply that he was thinking about the neighbours: it was a generous gift, this performance by Haffner of 'Begin the Beguine'.

Some saw in his love of jazz songs an irrevocable flippancy. He had no respect, Goldfaden used to say, for authority. It was quite extraordinary. But Haffner wasn't so sure that this was true. His authorities were simply different from those of other people. Esmond tried to find authority in his wife; his grandson found it in his rabbi. Other people depended on their manager, their marriage-guidance counsellors. Haffner found it in jazz. He took what he could. How strange was it anyway to listen to Cole Porter? Had anyone else come up with better descriptions of the heart's affections? Not Shakespeare, as his daughter argued; not the writer of the Psalms, as Benjamin now argued.

Every time we say goodbye, I die a little. That was all it took for Haffner to shiver with emotion.

There was a stringent division in the record collection which Haffner shared with Livia. Haffner owned the jazz. Livia admired her opera singers, her great conductors. She was the one who owned the cumbersome box sets — the collected symphonies, the complete quartets. As an encouraging birthday present, she had given Haffner Mozart's Haffner Symphony. He had tried to listen, but he had to confess that he saw no interest in it. Not even with such a title. No, if Haffner tried to improve himself, he preferred to read. That was his chosen domain of education. Whereas when it came to music, he preferred the songwriters: Arlen, Gershwin, Mercer. The songs from the era when Haffner was young: the songs from before the era when Haffner was young.

According to the liner notes on the record Haffner loved most — of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter — the qualities which made Porter great were Knowledge, Spunk, Individuality, Originality, Realism, Restraint, Rascality. Haffner had no problem with this list. Its last term, however, was a problem for Haffner's idea of the aesthetic. The last quality on the liner notes was Maturity. And Haffner could do without maturity. As if that was an ideal. The greatest education possible, thought Haffner, would not lead its citizens into an age of responsibility, but instead would escalate them to the rarefied heights of dazzling, starlit, spangled immaturity.

He was saying goodbye, said Haffner to Frau Tummel: and then he turned away.

— Raphael, said Frau Tummel.

Haffner turned back.

But Frau Tummel did not say anything. She smiled at him, in a way which she hoped was happy. And Haffner, once more, turned away.

He had finally become his father. The man who drifted away. It had never been his aim. He had done his best to avoid becoming Papa. At least, for instance, it had only been the one wife for Haffner. He had that over him. But still, all the motifs were there.

His father had been the quietest man he ever knew. One finger was missing, due to an accident in the Great War, for which Papa never offered an explanation. A photograph survived somewhere — in a box in some attic, acrid with asbestos — of Solomon Haffner, smiling as he held a grenade in his muddy hand: like the proud cultivator of a prize marrow at a provincial gardening show. But Solomon never talked. So Haffner had been forced to imagine the reasons for his missing finger: chewed off in hunger, blown away by a bullet, poisoned to the root by acid. The word for his father, said his mother, was destroyed. Some of Papa had been destroyed. Raphael had to understand this. She said this to Haffner when yet another cook was sitting in the hall, waiting to be interviewed, since her predecessor, along with several others, had condescended to treat Solomon Haffner in ways which went beyond the normal domestic duties of domestics. She only hoped (oh Mama!) that Raphael would not behave in this way when he was a man.

And as if the powers governing Haffner wished to demonstrate how comprehensively he could be entrapped, Haffner's phone went — stowed in his tracksuit pocket. The voice of his grandson asked him if things were fixed yet. Had he managed to get any further?

Really, thought Haffner, Mama had been correct all along. It wasn't right, for Haffner to be adult. The duties were beyond him.

At the moment, the twenty-three-year-old Benjamin was in Israel, somewhere near Tel Aviv. He was at a summer school in a rabbinical seminary, where he was educating himself about the history of his people. His people and their invented traditions. As Haffner argued. In Tel Aviv, in his self-imposed isolation, Benjamin had taken on — for reasons which were obscure to his grandfather — the burden of his family's disappointment in Haffner. Every day, he had called Haffner: wondering when the matter would be fixed. Because no one understood, said Benjamin, why it was taking so long. He couldn't understand it himself. He really thought, he said, that Haffner should at least be explaining what was going on.

— Your mother put you up to this? said Haffner.

Benjamin assured him that this wasn't true. He was only, he was only trying to understand what was going on.

Everyone was tired of the grandfathers. Everyone was bored with the everlasting males. This seemed fair.

Was it possible that Haffner wasn't the father of his child? He envied his brother-in-law, Cesare, who had lived his life only for himself, unencumbered. Cesare's lone state had always worried Livia. It had never worried Haffner. Or there were those other men, the cuckolds, with their blissful state of non-paternity. He could see the point of that as well. Oh Haffner so wanted to desert! It was just, he never had a clear idea of what he would desert for: no, he was not a natural elopee. Haffner had never joined the truant train of Bacchus — Bacchus, with his gang of heartbreakers, his absconding crew. Always, the final disappearance had been beyond him.

The first time he had heard the music of Artie Shaw was in his training camp in Hampshire, listening to the wireless with Evelyn Laye. She had expressed admiration. So, quickly, Haffner became a connoisseur; he developed a taste for the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the music of Hoagy Carmichael. Haffner loved the USA — that land of opportunity, of the Ritz, and razzmatazz. One night, waiting to find out what to do next at Anzio, when the options seemed decidedly limited, Haffner chatted to a black man in a US cavalry unit. His name was Morton. He was Haffner's double; his twin. They spent the night amusing themselves by coming up with the names of the great women songwriters: Kay Swift, of course; and Alice Wrubel. The geniuses for the standards.

But Morton was now dead too. Like everyone else whom Haffner loved, including Haffner's wife.

Haffner walked home, to the hotel. In the distant landscape, there were concrete buildings. These were the buildings of the Socialist renaissance. Their facades were stained concrete and patched glass. There was no ornament. A small sports complex, with its dank swimming pool and dark sauna. A home for the mentally ill. And out on the absolute edge of the town, where the motorway began, were the beginnings of the capitalist renaissance: the warehouses and their associates: the strip club, the pool hall, the strangely Chinese restaurant.

It was hard to see the attraction of this spa town. It was melancholy: chlorinated, salty, sulphuric. It wasn't the spa town which Haffner had imagined. It wasn't for Haffner. He wished he were anywhere else but here. He'd rather, quite frankly, be in a provincial town in Britain, standing at a bar where coked-up girls drank Malibu through fluorescent plastic straws. Haffner's image of the sanatorium had been a lustful, tubercular hothouse. That was surely what it had been like, in the era of the Great War — before Haffner had even been born. The stories Livia had reported! Of docile and female patients, their legs akimbo in stirrups. The women would invent symptoms, just so they could be treated by the stern philandering doctors, there, on the examination table. They would lay themselves out, tense specimens to be relaxed and galvanised by massage. Or even, wondered Haffner, they would begin to enjoy the tenderness of the speculum. Because it was very possible, Haffner had once been told, by a girl whom he believed was flirting with him, that one could climax through these examinations: it had once been very embarrassing for her, but the nurse assured her it was entirely normal. A fact which, when relayed idly to Livia, received only an abrupt refutation.

On Livia, Haffner paused.

She used to refute him, often. She was Haffner's educator. This seemed like Haffner's ideal of marriage. Without her, he was adrift. But adrift as he was, now that she was absent, he could still admit that not even in Haffner's moral philosophy was it possible to argue that his attempt to secure her inheritance should have transformed itself into this Haffnerian farce: the bored affair with a married woman; the excited affair with a girl who was half a century younger than him. In neither of which, thought Haffner, did Haffner seem to be in control. No, it rather seemed to be Haffner on the massage table, supine: Haffner himself in stirrups.

A cold remorse flowed through him. Today, he thought, would be the day he finished this business of Livia's villa. Let his grandson be proud of Haffner! He would go back to that committee room, he would try once more. No one would vanquish Raphael Haffner.

And so he strode in his damp sportswear through the hotel's uniform gardens. The electric doors of the entrance hissed open, and Haffner hurried in, only to be called back by the receptionist. He hadn't, presumably, forgotten about his early massage?

Mr Haffner, thought Haffner — who? Him? That schmuck could forget anything.

But Haffner was in a new era of maturity. He asked if the massage could wait. The receptionist thought that it could. So Haffner strode on, and returned to his room.

He stood there, looking in the mirror — contemplative at the sketchy portrait of Haffner. The diminutive slope of his belly seemed suddenly sad to him now: the fat, the mark of the human. His penis hung there, in its brief tuft of hair, so oblivious, thought Haffner sadly, to the history of its glories and disasters. The veins on his chest were turquoise behind his skin. Bruises, like passport stamps, lay on his shins and arms.

It seemed unlikely, he admitted, that Zinka could love him. But Haffner was not downcast. He was unmockable when it came to his body. And in this, truly, he was greater than Julius Caesar, who was so disturbed by his lack of hair that he combed the thin strands forward over his head. Which was one reason, and perhaps the most important, why Caesar, it was said, so coveted the laurel wreath.

Haffner was not vain. He dismissed the love Frau Tummel felt for him; he dismissed the love he might feel for Zinka. He was an emperor, a dictator.

Now, he had to deal with his inheritance.